After Information Minister Khieu Kanharith announced an election victory for the ruling CPP Sunday night, the opposition remained silent, saying only that they would wait for the official results from the National Election Committee (NEC).
But one thing could not be disputed: When the CPP makes an early call on national election results, they are never far from the mark.
Following the last election in 2008, Mr. Kanharith claimed within hours of polls closing that the ruling CPP had increased its dominance inside the National Assembly from 73 to 91 seats.
His prediction proved to be only minutely inflated; the CPP, when official results became available via the NEC, was found to have taken 90 of the Assembly’s 123 seats.
The opposition SRP was calling the election a much more even split, optimistically estimating that the CPP and the SRP had each won “between 50 and 70 seats.”
In 2003, Cambodia’s third election, Mr. Kanharith again made an early call on the result, giving his CPP a total of 73 seats, with the royalist Funcinpec party and SRP claiming 26 and 24 seats, respectively, by CPP estimates.
When results became official 10 days later, Mr. Kanharith’s numbers were found to be spot on.
And in the 1998 national election, despite the NEC delaying the release of preliminary results due to “communication and technical problems,” the CPP again made an advanced claim.
This time it announced that it had won 66 seats to Funcinpec’s 42 and the SRP’s 14.
When the NEC finally released its results 10 days after the ballot, the CPP was again seen to be an accurate marker, having magnified its margin by just two seats.
Mr. Kanharith’s call Sunday claimed the CPP had secured 68 National Assembly seats to the CNRP’s 55.
NEC Secretary-General Tep Nytha said those results were still unofficial and could be subject to change.
“Those are just the individual party’s results,” Mr. Nytha said.
“That does not represent the actual result; we need to collect at least 50 percent of the votes from the provinces before we can release numbers. It will take two days.”
“We can not predict anything. There are so many votes still to count,” he added.
(Additional Reporting by Mech Dara)
